Netherlands

Self-supported bicycle trip in

The Netherlands - 2023

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Day 4 - Saturday

Bicycled 28.8 miles today from Schiedam to Dordrecht.

Day's theme - windmills.

We started the morning with breakfast at our hotel, then packed up our belongings into the panniers and other bags and trundled it all downstairs. Thank goodness this hotel has an elevator. We walked down the street to fetch our bicycles and brought them back to the hotel so we could load all our stuff on them. While we were doing that, I heard Steve say hello to someone like they recognized each other. It was one of our waiters from last night's dinner. We're already making friends here for our return trip!

The ride out of the city and into Rotterdam was fairly straightforward. There were a couple places with short detours for construction, but it was easy to see where we were to rejoin the route. We paused several times to take photos along the various harbors we saw. At one point, we saw several worn and faded markings from the 2010 prologue for the Tour de France, which ran through Rotterdam. The markings were on the bike trail, so perhaps we have now cycled a portion of a Tour de France route.

We rode past the Erasmus Bridge, another small harbor, and the southern terminal of the Maastunnel, a 1,070-meter underwater tunnel which runs under the Nieuwe Maas River at Rotterdam and provides a connection for both bicyclists and pedestrians (in separate tunnels). It is an amazing piece of architecture, begun in 1937 and completed in 1942. It first opened in February 1942 without an official opening ceremony to avoid having to include the Nazis. As it was, the Nazis rigged the tunnel with explosives so it could be blown up at a moment's notice, but the explosives were never detonated.

After the end of WWII and the liberation of the Netherlands, the tunnel was an important artery acros the Nieuwe Maas River because most workers lived on one side, and the workplaces were on the other. It is estimated that in the 1950's, nearly 40,000 cyclists used the tunnel every day. Today, it handles a smaller volume, around 5,000 cyclists per day. See more information and photos at this link: https://bicycledutch.wordpress.com/2021/03/17/the-rotterdam-maastunnel-has-been-renovated/

Our route continued along the north side of the river bank, and we passed by the docks where a barge for Viking Cruise Lines was moored.

Our own river crossing of the Nieuew Maas River was made a short ways upriver from the Maastunnel, on the van Brienenoordbrug which carries several lanes of motor traffic as well as pedestrians, mopeds and bicyclists. Our route started at a long, gradual climb up a ramp and over the bridge in our own dedicated lanes, separated from all the cars and trucks by a high barrier.

As we coasted down the ramp on the other side, we rolled into Oude Ijsselmonde, where we picked up the trail again. We passed by an old Protestant church with a courtyard filled with flowers and memorial wreaths, laid at the base of a sculpture in honor of war dead.

We rode along quiet bike trails, getting further and further from the center of Rotterdam and into the suburbs. We paused in a quiet park to enjoy our small sandwiches, and a couple of geese with a half-dozen goslings lurked around us, hoping for a handout.

When we reached the suburb of Ridderkerk, we boarded a ferry which took us across the Noord to Kinderdijk, a wetlands area with dozens of old windmills. It is a popular spot for tourists and families, and we took the opportunity to get a cup of coffee at a souvenir shop and use the restroom. Then we pedaled on. Our route went smack dab down the middle of all the windmills, so we didn't hurry. We couldn't really, because we were dodging pedestrians and taking photos as we went. After about 20 minutes, we'd reached the point where the pedestrians had thinned out, and we moved on toward the south.

For the first time, we were finally in a quiet countryside. Even the days in the dunes were not devoid of people as these next miles were. We pedaled by farmsteads, pastures with various farm animals and little clusters of houses not quite sufficient to qualify as a village but certainly enough to make a neighborhood.

When we reached Pappendrecht, we boarded another ferry, this one headed for Dordrecht. But they had some difficulty with the hydraulics for the gangplank, so we could not depart until they could pull the gangplank up. Steve and another passenger jumped in to help the skipper as he and the conductor heaved on a couple of ropes to pull the gangplank back, and the skipper indicated that all the passengers would need to deboard on the forward plank when we reached the other shore.

Our hotel in Dordrecht, Villa Augustus, is a repurposed city water tower. There are actually rooms up in the top of the tower where the water tank once was, but we had a garden room down on the ground level. The establishment was once surrounded by polders, but these have been converted for gardens - formal gardens, flower gardens and vegetable gardens. We enjoyed admiring the incredibly neat tracts of flowers, herbs, etc.

After we checked in, we rolled our bikes around to the room's door opening on to the garden, and we offloaded the bags. The hotel had a secure bike storage building where we stashed the bikes for the night. After we showered, we enjoyed a dinner of grilled sea bass at the restaurant hotel, and then headed back to the room. From our dinner table, we had seen a little orange cat wandering around in the gardens, and Steve asked the waiter if he knew the cat's name. He did. It is Freek (pronounced "Frake.")

As we crawled into bed, we checked the weather forecast for tomorrow and made some preliminary choices for what things to have ready in the morning. We got lucky on today's weather in that the rain that was in the forecast did not materialize until we were already in the hotel. We can only hope to be so lucky tomorrow when once again rain is in the forecast for the afternoon.

Our route tomorrow takes us from Dordrecht to Zaltbommel, and we made a few changes in our plan to cut about 10 miles off the route.